Beginning with Hope

“Although he had no inkling of where his future would lead him, he did feel strongly, often with anguishing clarity, that his destiny was shaping itself.”

 – Herman Hesse, Narcissus and Goldmund

At 22 years old, I found myself on the verge of something I couldn’t quite identify. I had lived, up to that point, following what felt like a linear path, checking off the boxes young people were expected to. Follow the path, don’t stray too far outside the perimeter: work hard in school, get involved in extracurricular activities, make friends, find a job, try to find love. But as I neared the end of college, the finish line looming with no clear path beyond it, I lost what little sense of certainty and security I’d been holding onto. Suddenly, that low-level, always-in-the-background, just beneath the surface fear and worry had emerged from the periphery and begun to dominate my view. Although I couldn’t name it then, didn’t know what to call the crushing fear and loneliness I felt so much of the time, I now realize I was dealing with those twin thieves – anxiety and depression – that robbed me of joy and kept me locked in a state of insecurity and isolation.

Most of the time, I felt deeply lonely even though I was surrounded by people – good, kind, loving people full of compassion who were willing to support me. I often felt a deep unfounded shame, a fear of being truly seen and known, and it made me keep those around me always at arm’s length, an attempt to protect myself from the pain of what I saw as inevitable rejection. I had learned to compartmentalize my life, curating versions of myself to fit specific groups or situations. There were my social friends and the person I became with them: the fun one who went to parties and could shot gun beers and would often drink until she blacked out, recoiling on the inside the next day as these same friends laughed, recounting the drunk antics of the night before. There were my intellectual friends and the version of me that would stay up all night studying with them, having debates about political philosophy, history, and economics. And there were the friends I went to church with on Sundays, or the ones who knew the version of me that talked about faith and spirituality, who explored questions surrounding God and the universe. I worked hard to keep those compartments – those people with whom I only shared the version of me that I wanted them to know – separate. I tried to avoid any overlap, and integration of all of those versions of myself into a single identity felt nearly impossible. The weight of it was staggering, and by the final semester of my senior year, it felt like it was crushing me.  

In the spring of 1999, I had a small but significant mental and emotional breakdown, and I began to see a therapist. Working with him, I started to examine and unravel some of the negative thought patterns that had played on repeat for so long in my mind. In our first session, the therapist kept scribbling down notes, and at the end of our appointment he said, “I was writing down all of the times you said some variation of ‘there’s just something wrong with me; if I could just figure out what’s wrong with me.’ You said it nearly 10 times in one hour.” Therapy helped, but I continued to feel trapped in a life that felt mostly unintentional. I hadn’t so much chosen my path as I had settled for it, had accepted the identity, the relationships, the life others had offered to me without any clear sense of what I wanted or needed. 

It was in this mental space that I found myself as the new millennium dawned.  I was living in Santa Barbara, the beautiful coastal city about two hours north of my childhood home in Southern California.  I had recently graduated with a BA in International Relations from UCSB, one of ten campuses of the University of California system, known for its scenic location on the Pacific coast and it’s lively social atmosphere. I had taken a job at a downtown law firm, a job that felt like another check mark on my list of “shoulds” I had been following, where I spent 8 hours a day scrolling through reams of electronic documents and coding them for a class action lawsuit. After work, I’d spend my evenings with friends at happy hours, downing $1 margaritas, or sipping cocktails and dancing at the Wildcat Lounge. I was living paycheck to paycheck, constantly worried about how to pay my bills and cover rent. I was exhausted, feeling generally lost with no real sense of where I was headed. I knew something needed to change, knew that I needed to clear away the obstacles I had put in my own path, but felt unsure of how to take any meaningful, decisive action to create a life I genuinely wanted to live in.

So, it was from this mindset, this place of recognizing the need to create something intentional, something that reflected what I truly wanted from life, that I began to formulate my plans to move abroad. I’m not sure I totally recognized it at the time; but I think choosing to move to the other side of the world, to move to a place where I didn’t know anyone or anything, where everything would be new and unfamiliar and uncomfortable, was about forcing myself into a situation where I would have to make choices with intention and clarity in order to survive. While part of it simply felt like a grand adventure – teaching English as a foreign language in a city with 14th century castles and cobblestoned streets, traveling to different cities and countries on the weekends from my home base in the heart of Europe, stories to later entertain and delight my friends and family back home in the States – it also represented a portal into a new life for me. I viewed it as an opportunity to finally get to know myself, what I really valued and wanted, away from what felt like the pressure to shape myself into whatever mold the people in my life needed from me. I didn’t know where the adventure would lead me, just that it felt like the start of something real and meaningful in my life – something that I was intentionally choosing and shaping for myself. And because of that, I felt hopeful. 

In Disturbing the Peace, Vaclav Havel – the Czech writer and dissident who went on to become the first president of the Czech Republic – asserts that hope and optimism are not the same thing: “[hope] is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.” I didn’t have to understand what the outcome of this move would be, didn’t have to understand what it was I would discover, in order to feel the conviction that it was the right next step for me. And it was with this conviction that I boarded a plane in Los Angeles bound for Prague in February of 2001 with nothing but a giant backpack, my passport, and $1,000 in travelers checks hidden throughout the various pockets of my carryon bag. Heading to a city I knew only from reading Milan Kundera novels, in a country I could barely locate on a map, I felt the exhilaration of flying myself to a new me, one that I would, for the first time, invent and define: a me separate from the identity that had seemed to unfold for me absent of my own intention. I would finally have the chance to see what I was capable of on my own.